Iron Gold

by Pierce Brown

  Winkle, a nihilistic, sleepy-eyed Green, is our lead cyber operations officer. His face is a pincushion of piercings and fashionable digital tattoos. He’s particularly fond of monsters, and a blue dragon perches on his neck, its tongue slithering up his chin. His hair is acid green and defies gravity.

  “Fuck. I’m already fucking seasick,” he says, lugging his equipment out. “I’ll never be able to work on this fucking floating tetanus trap.”

  “Rough ride, Winkle?”

  “Char flies like a madman.” He sniffs the air. “Ugh. Smells like an asshole after Venusian stew. Thraxa, doll, will you take me off this deck and to the coms.” Thraxa leads him away to the bridge. “Never thought I’d miss the gorydamn desert….”

  I hop up into the ship and find Colloway finishing his landing protocols. “You hit turbulence?”

  “Manmade,” he says. “Winkle talks too much.”

  I laugh. “How’s the sky?”

  “Civilian traffic only. If the Republic knows we’re here, they’re waiting till you go down.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “I aim to please.” He winks. The older man is so handsome it’s easy to see why they make toy figurines in his likeness.

  I hop off the craft and watch my niece bring Thraxa battery packs for her power hammer. No more than a third Thraxa’s weight, Rhonna looks a child even amongst the smaller Howlers. I had a mind to leave her behind at the Den, but she won’t be in harm’s way today. Had to give her a taste of action before the more dangerous Venus leg of the mission.

  “She’s still bitter about the Iron Rain,” Pebble says to me at the base of Colloway’s ship.

  “Well, pouting isn’t going to make me put her in the sub.”

  “She just wants to prove herself.”

  “And she can, when her life and someone else’s isn’t at risk.”

  “She’s as old as we were when we fell in our first Rain.”

  “And look at all the dumb shit we did.” I glance over at my friend. Her cherubic face looks younger than her thirty-three years. Bright, optimistic eyes look out from cheeks as flushed as they were when she rode back with Mustang after besting House Apollo. Without malice, but possessing incredible fortitude, Pebble has faced more battles by now than even Ragnar ever saw. Seems just yesterday that Cassius was mocking her at the feast before the Passage, along with Roque, Antonia, and Priam. We see who got the last laugh.

  “You know, Pebs, if Sevro is the father of the Howlers, you just might be the mother.”

  “Ha. I think that’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all year, boss.” She wrinkles her nose as, across the deck, Sevro and Clown cackle to each other as they compete to see who can urinate farther over the side of the boat. “And what…interesting progeny we have.”

  When we’ve reached our coordinates at six in the morning, I follow the rest of my men out onto the deck. My muscles ache from the hard gravity of Earth. It’s been some time since I labored in a gravity gym. The air on deck is crisp and clean, the ocean calm as it laps against the rusty hull. Rhonna leans against the starboard railing with her arms folded, in a mood at being left with the support platoon on the crabber. I join her as the others make their preparations.

  “Remember to keep an eye on the jamming array,” I say. “Last thing we need is for one of the crew to get free and send out a signal.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And make sure Winkle doesn’t snort too many amphetamines.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t worry, my goodlady,” Alexandar says, walking past with Milia. She’s a Gold from my army at the Institute who joined the Rising with the flood of minor Martian houses that declared themselves for Mustang after the Ash Lord nuked New Thebes. Alexandar and Milia are an odd pair. Milia looks as if she’s been recently resurrected, with pale skin, sunken cheeks, and the most nihilistic temperament I’ve ever met in a human. While Alexandar wouldn’t have been out of place as one of Antonia’s pretty concubines. That fine jaw and the white-gold hair that flutters behind him like a comet tail. Even I find myself resenting the boy at times. On the outside, he’s the picture of all I ever hated. “I’ll make sure I bring you a trophy, so long as the decks are clean and scrubbed. I want them shiny enough to eat off of,” Alexandar says with a grin.

  Rhonna glowers at him.

  “Can’t believe you’re taking that gilded shit,” she mutters. Her jealous eyes follow the Howlers going over the side. My brother was heartbroken when she signed up for the legion training at sixteen. She was assigned to a unit in the thick of fighting on Mercury, but by merit of her examinations I had pretext to bring her onto my personal staff as a lancer. She was not pleased.

  “Rhonna, you’re just too short to pass as a Gray. We’re a Society commando squad. If you’re not six feet, you’re staying on the ship. Same goes for everyone.”

  “Not Min-Min.”

  “Min-Min is staying in the sub. Besides, she’s a veteran.”

  “You don’t think I can handle myself. Do you?” She jerks her head at the Howlers. “The rest of them think that I’m only your lancer because you’re my blood. They think I’m just dead weight.”

  “No one thinks that.”

  “Colloway literally said that to me.”

  “Colloway is an asshole. Listen, if you weren’t my blood, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or I’d get a new lancer. You can’t have it both ways. Suck it up. Do your job, and you’ll get your chance.”

  Her jaw works. “Yes, sir.”

  I find Sevro watching me from the other side of the ship. “What?”

  “You remind me of my father more every day.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”

  “Me neither.” He snorts. “I want to say again, for the potentially posthumous record, that this is a shit idea.”

  “Do you have another way onto Luna?” I ask.

  “About a dozen that don’t include releasing a psychopath.”

  “A dozen which you, me, Thraxa, and Pebble all picked apart. I thought you agreed to this.”

  “It’s important the mutts think we’re synced up,” he says. “But I still don’t like it. Didn’t you learn anything from the Jackal?”

  “The Jackal didn’t have a bomb in his brain.”

  “I still say we should steal a Gold ship,” he says stubbornly.

  “And how would we find one?” I ask. “Patrol the inner orbits and pray any fully-rigged ships of war we see don’t outgun us? If we do manage to board, fight our way through a battalion of space legionnaires, they’ll frag their codebank as soon as we board and transmit a distress signal. That means we show up at Venus, which is guarded by the totality of Society naval power, injured, depleted from corridor fighting, with nothing but our pricks in our hands. And after all that, we’d still need an army once we land there.”

  “Then we stop by Mercury and pick up some legions.”

  “Which of our friends will we have to kill then?” I ask sharply, and nod to the water. “This psychopath is our key, our army, and our escape plan.”

  He lets me finish, unimpressed. “I once saw a man try to ride a shark….”

  “Where the hell did you see that?”

  “Europa.”

  “When?”

  “Callin’ me a liar?” He glares at me. “Point is we won’t be able to control him.”

  “Then we kill him.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Sure, if you down more guards than me. If I win, I get the honor.”

  We shake on it.

  Outside the door to the submersible, I pause, hesitating before ducking into the narrow hatchway. Once I was a creature of tunnels and caverns. I felt safe in close confines. The Jackal twisted that nature in me. My body itself remembers the cold walls of his table and rebels against me every time I approach narrow spaces. I hide my fear from my men and slip through the hatch.

  Thirty minutes l
ater, the submersible sinks into the sea. With the Obsidians absent, we’ve had to combine my unit heavy knight with Sevro’s Ghosts—Alexandar, Clown, Thraxa, Pebble, and Milia. Their multiRifles carry nonlethal spider venom munitions for meat targets and electrical rounds for armor. Ink black in their scarabSkin, they’re packed behind me in the passenger hold. It’ll be a tight fit on the ride up with our cargo. Min-Min steers the submersible from her seat in the nose with her hands in gel controls. Through the reinforced forward viewports, there’s nothing but gray water. As we dive deeper, out of reach of the sun’s rays, the hull creaks. The pressure builds and the water blackens as the ocean squeezes us into its fist and drags us down and down.

  It takes us an hour to reach the abyssal plain at the bottom of the sea. A halo of lights around the front of the submersible illuminates the sand of the ocean floor. Out there in the darkness, three Poseidon-class Republic submarines patrol the Porcupine Abyssal Plain that stretches from the west coast of the British Isles to the slopes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Up on the deck of the crab trawler, under protection by Rhonna and the others, Winkle is embedded deep in the cyberscape, linked in to the Republic’s Starhall mainframe through a back door Theodora had her men prepare for him. The location of the sentinel submarines blinks on a holographic display to the right of Min-Min’s navigation controls. The nearest one is two hundred kilometers southeast, patrolling in a circular arc around her charge.

  We creep along the bottom of the ocean, undetected. Designed for future war on Europa, this prototype—stolen by Sevro last week—was built with sonar-resistant skin in a Republic lab on Earth. He disguised the theft by detonating explosives in the warehouse. I had Winkle issue a false press release from the Red Hand taking credit for the sabotage. By the time the authorities clear the rubble and the Red Hand disavows, we’ll already be on our way to Venus and they’ll think this was all the work of Society commandos and their Securitas agents. So I hope.

  Fifty kilometers from our destination, we enter into the drone defense grid and cut our lights. Up on the boat, Winkle accesses the drones via the mainframe and puts the data acquisition from the drones on loop. We pass through the defense grid.

  Clown shifts uncomfortably between Milia and Thraxa. “If Winkle’s wrong and they spot us…”

  “Shut up,” Sevro mutters.

  “I’m just saying dying here at the bottom of the sea, caged by lung-crushing pressure, is not how I expected to go.”

  “How did you expect to go?”

  “Well, smothered under tits, actually.”

  “Thraxa, I can’t reach my husband. Hit him for me?” Pebble says.

  Clown holds up his hands. “A joke, darling! All I’m saying is that this is essentially a metal coffin.” Milia looks at him with sullen eyes and Clown smiles awkwardly.

  The thought of this being a metal coffin makes my skin crawl again. But no torpedo comes and we press through the grid. After this, Republic cyber forensics will discover Winkle’s back door and we’ll be severed from the Republic’s information network. It’s a hard price to pay, but worth it if it gets us onto Venus. I only hope Theodora isn’t incriminated. With her position in Starhall’s intelligence bureau, she’s too valuable to my wife to be spent on me.

  “You hear that?” Sevro asks. I strain my ears, hearing nothing at first, then something like a heartbeat. It vibrates softly through the hull of the ship. The heartbeat grows louder. Thickening, multiplying till it sounds like a wooden stick dragged down a rib cage. Then we see it through shadow and silt.

  Our quarry.

  Deep in the darkness of the ocean moves a huge, humped behemoth. A shadow that glitters with lights upon its dark crest. The lights bathe its metal carapace in pale blue. I’ve seen it on schematics before, but in the metal flesh, it’s a dreadful sight of an older age. The prison is like a giant primordial crab crawling along the abyssal plain. A dome ribbed with intake vents and docking stations and barbed with antennae monopolizes its cephalothoric bulk. The dome sits upon a legion of barnacle-covered hydraulic metal legs that thump against the sand as they drag the station across the ocean floor. Several long umbilical tubes hang from the belly of the dome to suck refuse and litter into her recycling processors and incinerators. Inside her belly, she holds trash of a fouler sort.

  For four hundred years, Deepgrave Prison has crawled the abyssal plains of Earth’s oceans, sucking up the sins of Old Earth and punishing the sinners of the Society—murderers, rapists, terrorists, political prisoners. Now, war criminals.

  One of Mustang’s many reforms in her first days of power was the abolition of the death penalty in the Republic. Informed by revolutions of Old Earth, she feared that it would be abused to mete out fraudulent justice to deposed or innocent Golds and mark the Republic with a stain of genocide that could never be washed out. But she couldn’t pass it while the Jackal was alive. It would be seen as nepotistic. The day she pulled Adrius’s feet, she abolished capital punishment. All the war criminals, all the oppressors, slavers, and murderers whom I would have hanged, are here.

  And now I’ve come to free one of the worst.

  Min-Min guides our submersible through the legs of Deepgrave, banking us up to the underside of the dome. The hull shudders violently as she engages the magnetic couplers and the submersible’s top hull locks into place, creating a pressurized seal between our thermal drill and the prison’s hull. The drill whirs above us as energy from the engines funnels into the drill’s heat coils.

  When the drill has finished, it retracts back and shifts sideways into its cooling sheath. Sevro waits several minutes for the heat to dissipate before cranking open the top exit hatch of the submersible. On the other side of the hatch, the circular block of hull from the carved hole is suspended by a gravity well built into the submersible’s penetration system. From the cockpit, Min-Min reverses the gravity and the block floats up into the station.

  “Hats on,” I say, donning my scarabSkin helmet. My vision goes dark and then the heads-up display flickers to life, brightening the confines of the submersible with its spectral amplifiers. The vitals and names of my friends appear above their heads.

  I step toward the hatch to go first, but Sevro puts a hand on my chest. “Trying to get a head start?” I ask.

  “Don’t be so competitive, boyo.”

  Milia and Clown go in front of me to take point, shouldering their multiRifles. Thraxa follows, her pulseHammer magnetically coupled to a holster on her back. Min-Min swings out of her pilot seat and tosses one of her drones into the air. Small as a thumb and matte black, the projectile races up the hole. She surveys through its cameras and gives us the thumbs-up.

  “Playtime.”

  The two point Howlers climb the ladder up to the hatch and then go weightless as the gravWell grips them and eases them up through the hole. Sevro removes his hand from my chest.

  “Your turn, princess.”

  Using the schematics stored in Starhall’s data vault, I chose the water filtration room as our point of entry. It’s dark, full of noise, and entirely automated. Huge machines suck in seawater and desalinate it for the use of the guards and the prisoners. I call up the map on my HUD and a blue waypoint flares to life, marking our target’s cell. White footprints glow on the display, illustrating the path we chose.

  I shoulder my rifle and lead them up out of the desalination plant. We move in silence. A station mechanic’s breathing is amplified by my helmet. He glows like a humanoid coal through a hulking photoelectrical oxygen splitter. I move forward, crouched. Then Sevro runs past me and slides to round the corner first. There’s the soft sound of a spider venom round hissing out the narrow barrel of his short-stock rifle. A body crumpling. Sevro hogties the man with plastic restraints and comes back around holding up one finger.

  “One.”

  Leaving the desalination level behind, we move through the lower bowels of the station like a silent nocturnal animal made of fourteen legs and arms. The station relies on its extern
al defenses, which would eviscerate even a heavy assault force of the Ash Legions, but on the inside, the security systems were made to keep men in, not out.

  We subdue several workers sipping coffee from thermoses as they set to their morning work, Sevro and I racing each other to be the first to hit them with our spider rounds. He’s better with firearms than I am, and it’s already four-to-one in his favor as we pass through heavy reinforced security doors so thick they appear to have been made by some ancient race. They’re old and rusted, like the rest of the bones and shell of this dilapidated crab station. Only the sinew is new. Glowing biometric scanners. Sun Industry drones. Crowd-suppressant gas nodules in the ceilings. All neutralized by Winkle’s access into the mainframe.

  We activate our ghostCloaks and slip into the open door of a guard station outside the massive doors to the high-security Omega Level. The guards gab to one another over tin breakfast bowls and drink Terran coffee spiced with chicory. To ensure loyalty to the Rising, most of the guards are from my planet. While the political officers are mostly Reds, and wear the Vox Populi inverted pyramid badges sewn into their uniforms to declare their affiliation to the proletariat, the bulk of the guards are still Grays.

  Once, I hated Grays. Ugly Dan and the rest of the tinpots that lorded over Lykos left a foul impression. But years on, I respect their discipline, their devotion to duty. And I pity them. For centuries they’ve been the frontline soldiers and battlefield pawns of Golds in house warfare. And now they toil for our Republic.

  I remind myself of the endgame: this will end the war. It must.